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My geeking daughter, who in Willy Wonka flashed Mr. Spock’s Vulcan greeting during Veruca Salt’s contract-signing scene, also worked a Star Trek reference into Godspell. Here as she says goodbye to Jesus, she is doing the Vulcan gesture in a tribute to Spock’s death (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

What kind of boss hires a thwarted actress for a business-to-business software startup? Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s 42-year-old cofounder and CEO, whose estimated double-digit stake in the company could be worth $300 million or more. He’s the proud holder of an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Canada’s University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Cambridge in philosophy and the history of science.“Studying philosophy taught me two things,” says Butterfield, sitting…

As a kid, I remember liking the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. As a teenager, I remember seeing a series of Coke ads in the summer, with the theme of “It’s too hot, look at these pictures of happy people in the snow, buy a Coke,” and then 6 months later I remember seeing commercials with the theme “It’s too cold, look at these happy…

Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where this was NOT a spoof. A spot-on parody of SportsCenter’s hyperbole-laden talking heads, busy CGI ticker screens, and obsessive play-by-plays, the clip cleverly reimagines athletes as the educators we entrust our children to every day.Unsurprisingly, it’s a biting critique that says a lot about the economic and symbolic power we assign to an industry in which men are considered exceptional…

Who owns the copyright to the “Happy Birthday” song? According to Snopes: Summy-Birchard, a subsidiary of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., the publishing arm of Warner Music Group, now claims to be the sole owner of copyright to the song “Happy Birthday to You” and collects an estimated $2 million per year in licensing fees (a portion of which are paid to Association for Childhood Education International) on that basis, and they…

Good writing skills are valuable, even in the world of STEM. How is it that students interested in careers in technology don’t understand that writing skills are a crucial part of their future success? What’s more, in my life as a writing coach, I’ve noticed that this aversion sometimes extends well past the undergraduate years and into the master’s and Ph.D. levels. In an effort to underscore the importance of effective…

Incredibly detailed close reading of the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I stopped reading it halfway through because I want to watch the movie again (haven’t seen it in years) so that I can really appreciate what this author is doing. I’m looking forward to coming back to this one! Yet the audience believes HAL because he’s not human. There’s a certain suspension of disbelief in the ability of a computer to coldly…